Quotes by Anatole Broyard

• The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.
• We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
• When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
• It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.
• There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form.
• To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.
• There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.
• The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable.
• Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
• Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
• People have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work.
• Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.
• The tension between "yes" and "no," between "I can" and "I cannot," makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.